With all the news this week surrounding two landmark Supreme Court decisions, it may have been difficult to stay on top of everything else that has been going on in politics.  In case you missed it, the ultra liberal “news” site Gawker, made the surprising decision to completely give up pretending it is a legitimate source of information.

Bristol Palin, the 24 year old daughter of former Alaska governor Sarah Palin, recently announced she was pregnant with her second child.  As a public spokesperson for abstinence and traditional values, it was obviously not something Bristol was excited about, and she was the first to admit as much by letting the world know she had let her family down.  Palin, who is not married, handled the situation in a mature and rational way for someone who had just been given life changing news.  The mainstream internet outlets however were an entirely different story.

Allie Jones published an incredibly insensitive and provocative story on Gawker today that resembled a tweet more than it did a news story.  The piece encouraged Bristol Palin to get an abortion.  We won’t link the article on SmallGovReport in hopes of discouraging such behavior but it can easily be found through any search engine.

The article, which was titled “Bristol Palin Makes A Great Argument for Abortion in Baby Announcement”, was extremely short and didn’t really even come close to justifying its title but the author did attempt to make one extremely flawed intellectual argument.

The article referenced several quotes from Bristol Palin which made it clear that she was very disappointed that she had let both herself and her family down by not learning the lesson of her first unexpected pregnancy.  Basically, Bristol publicly admitted she had made a mistake.

The author’s argument is that Bristol Palin is disappointed she made a mistake, so she should just get an abortion.  Because to Jones, that’s what an abortion is, getting rid of a mistake.  The obvious implication is that Bristol Palin should get an abortion because the world doesn’t need another Palin.  Every reader understood that, but the premise that anyone who accidentally gets pregnant should just get an abortion clearly ignores the pro-life position that every life is sacred and if you are mature enough to make the decision to have sex you should be mature enough to accept the risk that comes with that. Which Bristol did.

The article ends with this sarcastically gleeful comment, “Congrats on the baby!”

Perhaps the most troubling aspect of the Gawker article was that the author clearly didn’t care about what happened to this innocent life.  Bristol Palin’s unborn child is nothing more than a tool for the author to use for her personal goal of attacking Palin for being a conservative.  That kind of callousness has permeated the abortion debate on the left to the point where it’s almost impossible to have an intelligent discussion on the subject.

This specific discussion has little to do with the merits of the abortion conundrum and everything to do with the low brow journalism and overall moral bankruptcy required to tell a pregnant mother of less than a week that she should get an abortion.

This kind of hysteria from the media is not new when it comes to the Palins.  In fact, it has been a whole lot worse in the past.

Believe it or not, there was a time in American politics when the children of prominent figures were left alone and protected from salacious attacks.  That level of decorum seems to have completely evaporated since Sarah Palin came onto the scene as John McCain’s Vice-Presidential candidate in 2008.

Sarah Palin has a son with down syndrome which you would think would be totally off limits for the media to insult.  It hasn’t been.  The list of media figures that mocked Sarah Palin’s son Trig is by no means short.  Bill Maher, Family Guy, Wayne Brady, and countless liberal media outlets like Jezebel and Monkette all openly insulted Palin’s defenseless son.  Jezebel even went so far as to say that Trig wasn’t even Palin’s son and the whole thing was a hoax to gain votes.  David Letterman went another direction and cracked a joke in which the punchline was that Bristol, 18 years old at the time, was a slut. Edgy stuff.

Unfortunately, Gawker is not a fringe website.  A shocking amount of people take sources like that seriously.  There have been many who have made the argument that American politics is more divided than ever before and stories like this corroborate that belief.  Regardless of where you stand in the abortion debate, surely it is impossible to ignore the obvious reality that as a society, we can do better than this.